Using Metareasoning on a Mobile Ground Robot to Recover from Path Planning Failures

Abstract

Autonomous mobile ground robots use global and local path planners to determine the routes that they should follow to achieve mission goals while avoiding obstacles. Although many path planners have been developed, no single one is best for all situations. This paper describes metareasoning approaches that enable a robot to select a new path planning algorithm when the current planning algorithm cannot find a feasible solution. We implemented the approaches within a ROS-based autonomy stack and conducted simulation experiments to evaluate their performance in multiple scenarios. The results show that these metareasoning approaches reduce the frequency of failures and reduce the time required to complete the mission.